Re: New Guides for SA/Cisco Areas (Info from Ted Hodgins Blog)

I didn't see any problems with the S25 guide in Houston like the ones described in the linked thread. According to Ted, he and his team are working on the schedule for deploying S26 so I don't think that was the "official start" for deploying S26. He usually announces when an area will get a guide update. The last time frames have been mid 2012 and June.

The menu system can be changed without updating the guide. Maybe, there was a problem with that. In the last few weeks, Houston added season and episode information to the program description in the guide.

In iGuide, the menus are downloadable. That is why you sometimes get a 'please wait' and limited functionality for awhile after a reboot. You can even force a reload by changing the language.

The season/episode stuff was added to the iGuide data about 2 months ago to all users. It also started showing up on Motorola's, along with the loss of about a day's worth of programming due to it taking up more memory.

When the boxes are downloading the iGuide data, just how fast is the connection between the box and the headend it is getting the info from? I'm assuming it's a broadband connection, but is it at the same speed tier I'm paying for with Internet blast 30 or is it the extreme 105 tier?

If it's similar to the Motorola's, it uses what is called the OOB (Out-Of-Band) channel. It's typically either the 4MHz gap between RF4 and RF5, or an unused RF channel nearby. The datarate is rather slow. It's a low QAM or QPSK. That same channel is also used for:clockchannel map (every few minutes)near-term 6-8 hours data (probably every 20-30 minutes)long-term data (maybe once or twice a day now)menu downloadsfirmware updatesOnDemand menus (dynamic)OnDemand control (telling the box what frequency to tune to watch)Network control (iPads, etc...)

Use the following methods to determine when you wil get the new guide update.

quote:Hi Ted,

What I believe is frustrating to most of the Cisco/SA customers is the lack of a plan, communication and execution. I have been trying for over a year to find out what the plan is. If you tell us its 2014, then it is 2014. Its the lack of a plan and communication that is frustrating. How hard is it to put a plan together and publish?

quote:Hello Tom, my post below [Note: Link to a similar post »Re: New Guides for SA/Cisco Areas (Info from Ted Hodgins Blog) ] from May 1st outlines at a high level the plan that we have for our customers that have Scientific-Atlanta and Cisco branded cable boxes. We are scheduled to start delivering additional features and functionality over the summer of 2012.

Better communication is something that you will see as we get closer to delivering these new features in each area.

Typically notifications and announcements around products, channels and services are done via a combination of bill messages, e-mails, bill inserts, TV commercials, direct mail, box messages as well as this site [Note: continue to check Ted's blog].

Based off this information on the hardware capabilities, we are looking at about a 1.54Mbps data rate on that out-of-band channel which carries all the out of band data. This means that the guide data would only utilize a small portion of available speed.

rarely does this ever happen smoothly. Depending on which call center or web chat tech a customer gets, sometimes they have absolutely no idea the speed tiers Comcast offers. I've personally been told by techs that Comcast doesn't offer anything over 8Mbps or even 12Mbps for my area. When I politely inform them that I have Blast 30Mbps they say that is impossible and one even called me a dirty liar whom was later terminated. This becomes a problem when a customer is calling in about performance problems. It sounds like they have outdated information but they claim it is current until 2014. In contrast the North American call centers we have in Canada and the US are on the ball with their tech support stuff.

We are talking about the OOB data rate used by the cable boxes, not HSI. Although, most HD boxes do also have DOCSIS modems in them, but are usually not used. I think the Tivo-on-Motorola used it, and it may also be used whenever True2Way is rolled out.